20+ Homemade Water Filter Ideas You Can Make Today!

Water is one of the necessities of life, and without it, we can only survive a few days. This means being able to purify water is a basic skill that everyone should know – and here are 21 DIY water filter plans that show you how it’s done.

1. DIY Water Filtration System – Basics & Tips for Beginners

Before you start trying to build your own water filter, you’ll need to learn the basic concepts that make the process work. Once you’ve got your head around the science, you can then start thinking about building one of your own – and this site also has a couple of ideas you can try.

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2. DIY: Make Swamp Water Drinkable!

This is an amazing video. In it, this YouTuber takes some truly horrible-looking swamp water filled with slime, algae, mosquito larvae and who knows what else and shows us how to purify it to the point where it’s safe to drink. Furthermore, so confident is he with his filtration system that at the end of the video, that’s exactly what he does. Want to see how he manages it? Then check out his video!

3. DIY Water Filter

We love the Instructables site since its always a hugely useful resource for DIY plans for doing just about anything you can think of. Here, in the usual logical and clearly explained way, they teach us how to make a basic water filtration system from a plastic bottle and a few other materials that are equally easy to obtain. Fun to read and an interesting educational project to attempt.

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4. $5 Emergency Nanocarbon Water Filter

Some of the plans for DIY water filtration systems are enjoyable projects but not necessarily so practical in the real world. Not this one, though, since in this video, we learn how to make the same water filtration that is in use in this refugee camp in northern Uganda. The system uses inexpensive materials to provide vital drinking water that people rely on each day, and you can’t get more real than that!

5. How to Build a Bio Water Filter

This blog post talks about what would happen if there was a breakdown in society and it was impossible to buy replacement water filters for your off-the-grid property – in short, the answer is you’d be in trouble unless you knew how to make new filters yourself. And of course, the post then goes on to explain how it’s done, so have a look if you want to find out.

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6. How to Make a Water Filter

If you ever find yourself in an emergency situation, your primary concern is finding clean water to drink – and your only solution might be to construct a makeshift filter until you can locate a more permanent and reliable water source. This video teaches you how it’s done, so you can rest assured you’ll know what to do should the need ever arise.

7. How to Make a DIY Water Filter for Your Home

This blog page tells you how to make a more substantial and permanent water filtration system for your home. You can buy expensive versions and have them installed professionally, which might be a little easier – but if you can do it yourself, why spend the extra money when you don’t have to?

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8. Make Your Own Water Filter and Never Buy Drinking Water Again

In some places, chemicals are added to the local water supply to make it suitable for farming – but this has the undesirable effect of making it unsuitable for human consumption, meaning local villages are then forced to buy bottled water to drink. In this video, we learn how the problem was solved in one Thai village by the creation of a DIY water filtration system – and it’s fascinating and informative watching how they did it.

9. Homemade Water Filter Science Project

If you have kids, this is a great post that will help them learn about the value of drinking water and where it comes from. You can also teach them how to make a water filter using this guide – and you’ll probably end up learning a few new things yourself too.

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10. DIY 5,000-Gallon Water Filter for $50

When making DIY water filters, you can either spend a lot of money and make something fancy or you can spend as little as possible and make something that might be less pretty but that still does the job it was made for. This 5,000-gallon filter has an efficiency of 99.99% at 0.9 microns and costs only around $50 to make, making it a perfect option if you want to build something functional that won’t cost you a fortune.

11. How to Make Water Filter At Home Easy Way DIY

Here’s another informative post that gives you lots of useful facts about water and the purification process. It also has some suggestions for how to build your own water purifier, making it recommended reading for anyone interested in learning about how to make water safe to drink.

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12. DIY Water Filter with Manual Siphon Pump

This is a very “DIY” solution for making a water filter that incorporates a manual syphon pump. However, when you need to rig something up to provide clean water in a hurry, you might not be worried too much about the niceties, and in that case, this plan is one you can turn to.

13. Making an Emergency/Makeshift Water Filter

If you’ve ever watched any kind of end-of-the-world zombie apocalypse-type series or movies, you’ll know that when the undead attack and after you escape, you’ll need to locate a source of safe drinking water if you hope to prolong your survival. And if you want to learn how, this blog post gives you all the info you need.

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14. Homemade High-Volume Water Filter

For anyone looking for a quick, simple, inexpensive and reliable solution for filtering water, this could be just the video you need. It will only cost you around $7 for some basic supplies, and after you have them, you’ll be able to purify large quantities of water in no time at all.

15. How to Make a Homemade Water Filtration System for Your Whole House

If you are thinking about installing a water filtration system for your entire home, there’s quite a lot of research you’ll need to do before you decide whether you want to go ahead and how you should approach the project. If that’s the situation you’re in, this post is a great place to start, giving you lots of useful info as well as ideas for how to tackle it.

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16. Homemade Drinking Water Filter System

Here’s another water purification video from Thailand, this time by a YouTuber telling us how he rigged up a simple but effective system for his home. This is the kind of thing anybody will be able to replicate at home, and we’re sure lots of people will find it interesting to watch.

17. How to Build Your Own Home Water Filter System

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, so they say – and as it turns out, there are also quite a few ways to build a water filtration system. This blogger teaches us four of them, so you’re sure to find at least one that you’ll want to try.

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18. How to Make a Water Purifier

There are many different reasons why water can be unsafe – or simply unpleasant – to drink, and one of them is that it is full of particulate matter. In this video, you’ll learn how to build a purifier to remove such particulate matter, one of the necessary steps in rendering water potable.

19. The Best Emergency Water Filter for Survival

After a useful and easy-to-understand introduction to water purification and why it’s important, this blog gives us no fewer than eight solutions for making water safe to drink. This means whatever the situation you’re in, at least one of these techniques is probably going to be suitable for creating something that’s safe to consume.

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20. DIY Biosand/Biochar Water Purification System

If you live in an area with polluted groundwater, you might need a way of purifying it so that it’s safe for consumption. If that’s a situation you’re currently facing, this video is for you since it will teach you a DIY solution for your problems.

21. WikiHow – How to Make a Water Filter

Another of our favorite resources online whenever we want to know how to do something is WikiHow. Here, the site gives you all the necessary information you need for making a water filter plus plenty of tips for making it work. We’re big fans of this site, and if you’re unfamiliar with it, we recommend checking it out.

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Many ways to filter water but a vital skill to know

As you can see, there are many ways to filter water, depending on your situation and resources. However, it’s important to be aware of at least a couple of methods to ensure you will be able to produce something safe to drink if you are ever in a situation with no clean water.